proposal: make railway cli ai-agent friendly for infrastructure-as-code automation

[yigitkonur]

context

ai coding agents (claude code, cursor, codex, etc.) increasingly manage cloud infrastructure alongside application code. railway's cli is close to being fully automatable but has gaps that force agents to fall back to the dashboard or raw graphql calls.

this is a meta-issue summarizing the cli gaps that block end-to-end automation. each has its own issue linked below.

the gaps

capability	current state	needed
create service	works but prompts interactively (#799, #816)	fully non-interactive when flags provided
delete service	not available (#814)	service delete <name> --yes
list services	not available (#817)	service list --json
update service config	not available (#815)	service update --image/--repo/--name
move service between projects	not available (#818)	service move --to-project
dockerfile builds	railpack ignores railway.json builder override (#819)	respect builder: DOCKERFILE
stop/pause service	not available (#683, closed)	service stop/start

what "agent-friendly" means

1. every mutation available via graphql should have a cli command — agents can't use dashboards
2. zero interactive prompts when flags are sufficient — agents can't type into tty prompts
3. consistent --json output on all commands — agents parse structured output
4. --yes flag on all destructive operations — agents need explicit confirmation bypass
5. idempotent operations — running the same command twice shouldn't error (create-if-not-exists pattern)

who benefits

• ai coding agents automating deployments
• ci/cd pipelines provisioning infrastructure
• infrastructure-as-code scripts (reproducible setups)
• developers who prefer terminal over dashboard

related issues

• add service delete command for non-interactive service removal #814 — service delete
• add service update for changing image, repo, and service config without dashboard #815 — service update
• full non-interactive mode: eliminate all tty prompts when flags are provided #816 — non-interactive mode
• add service list command to enumerate services in a project #817 — service list
• add service move to transfer services between projects #818 — service move
• support railway up with dockerfile for docker image services (builder override) #819 — dockerfile builder override
• Allow to create service from CLI without any input #799 — create service without input
• Add support for stopping, pausing, and resuming services directly from the CLI #683 — stop/pause/resume